Tag: Phil Nurse

Despite being one of the very best trainers in MMA, Phil Nurse gets relatively little press and up until now very little has been publicly known about his life, careers and philosophies. He coaches Georges St. Pierre, Frankie Edgar and Jon Jones, just to name a few UFC fighters.

As we discovered when we visited Nurse at his downtown Manhattan gym, however, the Kru is much more than his impressive resume. He is a combat genius and is able to convey his unique perspective and vision to his students with calm clarity. It is no wonder that some of the best fighters in the world seek him out to become even better.

With Georges St. Pierre returning to action after a year and a half at UFC 154 this Saturday in Montreal, it is a perfect time to hear from one of his coaches and corner men in Nurse. After the jump, sit with us and listen to the newest episode of The Conversation where Nurse talk about his unlikely path to Muay Thai, his own fighting career, meeting Georges St. Pierre and the spirituality that can be found through fight training.

If you’ve ever wanted to see what a Nevada State Athletic Commission hearing looks like from the inside, you might be interested in these videos (courtesy of CageWriter), which show Karo Parisyan getting reamed for his painkiller use, Phil Nurse defending his own reputation, and BJ Penn crying for justice. In the above clip, Karo explains why he took those unapproved meds, and throws himself on the mercy of the commission. The "drifting in and out of the state of reality" line comes at 5:54, and the ruling begins at 7:48, where Commissioner John Bailey lays down the suspension and fine, and suggests that in the future, a mixed martial artist’s entire win bonus should be forfeited if he tests positive for banned substances.

Below, Nurse admits that in retrospect, his use of Vaseline during the St. Pierre/Penn fight "doesn’t look good," and gets grilled about it while BJ Penn stares him down at the other end of the table. After the jump: Penn comes out against all forms of cheating, one commission member basically calls bullshit on the idea that you can ingest something that makes you slippery, and another is just glad that GSP didn’t beat him to death. Plus, Penn’s lawyer Raffi Nahabedian calls for a full-scale investigation on Lubrigate.

That’s right, Penn brought his mother. And she was allowed to deliver a statement for some reason. Apparently someone was worried that this whole greasing scandal thing hadn’t gotten ridiculous enough yet. Problem solved.

As reported by Sherdog and the L.A. Times (which has a PDF of the full response), the Jackson camp provided seventeen pages of documents explaining what happened, why it wasn’t an intentional attempt to cheat, and why it had no bearing on Penn getting his ass handed to him.

A statement signed by Greg Jackson and Phil Nurse details the breathing technique used on St. Pierre between rounds and insists that video evidence shows only a “scant amount of Vaseline” ever found its way to GSP’s body. It also lays out four recommendations for improving the NSAC’s policies to avoid the greasing question in the future, including wiping down fighters before every round and using a “touch test” to see if they are unnaturally greasy. And of course they conclude by referring to Penn’s griping as “a desperate attempt to protect [Penn’s] reputation and commercial value after being totally dominated by a superior athlete.”